My buddy Mark Dimassimo was pissed. He’d been watching an inordinate amount of tennis and he’d reached his limit with the constant repetition of ads. Not that the ads were bad the first five, ten or twenty times he saw them. But around the hundredth time he was subjected to the same, singular “tennis” ad that each company had deigned to produce in order to be “relevant” during the tournament, he was, as I could tell form his tweets, texts and messages, about ready to hurl something toxic and large at his television machine.

We all know what an art director does, right? They make the pictures - and in a society that is as visually obsessed as ours is, that’s clearly a pretty important job.

And we all know what copywriters do too, right? They come up with the words that no one reads except the lawyers and the brand managers.

But creative directors? They don’t write – though they may have once. They don’t design, though they may have once. And they sure as hell don’t code. So just exactly what do they do, and more importantly, why the hell are you paying them?

What they do - and what you are actually paying them to do whether you realize it or not – is to be the bridge between the problem you have and the solution you pray people you don’t understand will come up with.